SKIEN, Norway — The Norwegian state, found guilty of treating mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik “inhumanely” in prison, said on Wednesday his limited contact with the outside world was necessary because he is trying to spread his ideology from prison, including in dating adverts.
On the second day of an appeals case into Breivik’s prison conditions, Attorney General Fredrik Sejersted told the court the right-wing extremist, who killed 77 people in twin attacks in 2011, was following the script outlined in his 1,500-page anti-immigration manifesto he published just before his killing spree.
“He has completed the active phase, and now he is working on his project as an ideologist and a writer to create networks,” Sejersted said. “There is unfortunately reason to believe that Breivik’s ideological project is unfolding as planned.”
The 37-year-old has considered the possibility of using “national-socialist dating adverts” as a means of spreading his ideology, since their content is protected under the European Court of Human Rights, Breivik noted in a letter read, like all of his correspondence, by prison officials.
“Basically, I consider the writing of dating adverts such a lame activity that it should be criminalized,” Breivik wrote in a letter to supporters in August 2015 and from which Sejersted read excerpts to the court.
“But in a bid to break the blockade on information at almost any price, I envisage an experiment. Paradoxically, there is no other type of text that is as protected as the publication of a dating advert,” Breivik wrote.
The appeals court is examining Breivik’s case after a lower court in Oslo ruled in April that his rights had been violated and he was subjected to “inhumane” and “degrading” treatment in prison, largely because he has been isolated from other inmates for five-and-a-half years.
For security reasons, the appeals case is being heard in the gymnasium of the Skien prison where Breivik is incarcerated.
In his preliminary remarks, Sejersted has argued that the strict prison conditions imposed on Breivik are justified by the danger he poses and the need to prevent him from building a network capable of carrying out new attacks.
In July 2011, Breivik gunned down 69 people, most of them teenagers, at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utoya, shortly after he killed eight people in a bombing outside a government building in Oslo. — AFP
